killed, already killed but not yet dead, an apparition.
The water chuckled. A tree creaked. A car approached on the road above – cars had passed there periodically, but this one slowed. Right above him, it halted.
Then it honked.
Ellis scrambled up the slope as quickly as he could, but as he came out of the brush, the car had already accelerated away. He heard its tyres shrieking a little around a curve.
He ran to the minivan. The road wound beside the stream for five miles before it came to an intersection, a four-way stop, and in the distance, left, right and ahead, he saw no one. A honk! It must have been Boggs. He hit the steering wheel.
Then his phone rang. From it Boggs said, ‘Right.’ And hung up.
‘Fuck you!’ Ellis shouted. But with a sensation of internal flailing, he turned right and drove as fast as he could.
A couple of dozen miles passed with no sight of Boggs. He called Boggs and listened to it ring several times. Then, to his surprise, it clicked and he heard Boggs say, ‘This jerk in front of me keeps tapping his brakes. Going uphill for God’s sake.’
‘Uphill?’
‘It’s a little hill.’
‘Are you tailgating?
‘I am now, because he keeps tapping the brakes.’
‘I guess anyone who wants to gets to be a jerk.’
‘That’s right. It’s an equal-opportunity society.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Just drive and drive and maybe I’ll hit something.’
‘You’re crazy. You’ll kill someone.’
‘People out here know the risks,’ Boggs said. ‘If you’ve put yourself out on the road, then by implication you’ve accepted the associated risks.’
‘I doubt that most people think of it that way.’
‘People do all kinds of shit without thinking.’
‘You’re not an asshole. Stop it.’
‘The problem,’ Boggs said, ‘is that you still want to think that we’re friends. Look at what’s happened. Look at where we are. What does friendship mean? This isn’t it.’
‘We don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to be anything. If you’ll just get some help. Just go home.’
‘You don’t really want me to go home and inject myself into Heather’s life again, go in and stir things and make a mess of the situation you’ve got.’
‘Whatever you need to do to work it all out.’
‘It would be a mess. I’m just thinking of your interests, Ellis.’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of humour.’
‘No, really you have to agree that puns are lower. I’ll take bad sarcasm over a good pun any day.’
‘If you have your humour, Boggs, then life’s OK, don’t you think?’
‘Not really. What’s the one got to do with the other?’
Ellis said, ‘You said
‘Right, wrong. Left, right.’
‘What?’
‘With a W.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Jacob Wright had been one of their clients. Ellis pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere, huh? Get it? We’re driving, getting somewhere. It’s a pun, pretty low.’
‘We’re not getting anywhere.’ He wasn’t. He was stopped on the shoulder.
‘Now, that’s what makes it funny, because it’s sarcasm, too.’
‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.
‘Boggs. Boggs, Boggs, Boggs.
‘I’m -’
‘
‘Shut up, Boggs.’
‘Am I bothering you?’
‘You can talk a circle right around me. Good for you.’
‘OK. Talk to the Dostoevsky.’ Ellis heard an audiobook playing. ‘
Then the silence of the dead phone line.
Jacob Wright had been a major defence client, a fat, affable attorney representing a manufacturer. Including everything, including even the jobs on which he and Boggs had only spent a few hours before everyone concluded that the case looked bad and should be settled, they must have worked for Wright on more than a dozen different jobs. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.
Ellis took out the map. The nearest Wright job that he could recollect lay – like a confirmation – 180 degrees off his current course.
He turned around.
Night had now taken the world completely. He passed an array of towering antennas with blinking red and white lights. An enormous solitary ghostly lit church. Fields where large numbers of fireflies were lighting, pale green sparks in great numbers all across the landscape – they glowed only as they flew upward so that they appeared to be always rising. Some rose over the road, and the ones that struck the windshield flashed brightly into green smears of phosphorescence that slowly, slowly faded. They began to mass in swarms that pelted the minivan – three, four on the glass before him, startling him with every impact, dead and luminous and beautiful. Then the fields ended with an eruption of residential housing developments; the fireflies vanished.
10.
THE ROAD, THE road: it came at him and spun out behind, varying without changing. Ellis knew – Boggs had taught him – that only four patches of rubber, each the size of the palm of a hand, touched the minivan to the road. They bore up its two tons of metal, glass, plastics and fluids, which in turn bore up himself and contained him and moved him in great comfort: climate-controlled, cushioned, radio and CD player at ready, cellphone charging, cup holders awaiting cups to cradle, visors set to block harsh sun glare, windows and mirrors powered at the touch of a button, cruise control to mind the accelerator.
His headlamps ghosted an interstate with a narrow median; a flavour of metal gathered in his mouth; cars came down the opposite lanes like fists. He drove until late, then slept in the minivan off a side road in a rutted open space. During the night he woke only once, with a raccoon crouched on the hood, staring with bandit eyes. Ellis pressed the horn, and the creature reared, smirked, loped away. Ellis watched a hanging half-moon and slept again until the sky was bluing. He woke cold but sweating. He turned the ignition for heat, but shut it off again and stood out to jog up the road a half-mile or so and back again. Swinging his legs and pushing himself forward without a gas pedal felt strange, and he returned to the minivan trembling and heaving, and rushed onward.
Like anyone, he could drive, he could hate it, and he could do it forever.
Sunflowers glowed in the window, endless bright heads peering upward. Black-and-white cows trundled over rolling terrain, drank at the foot of a madly spinning windmill. A haze filled the sky with the colour of weathered aluminum, and a monstrous Wal-Mart swam up out of the distance and flashed into the rear-view. Anything could be put rapidly behind; nothing could.
He felt very tired.
